Living wage

The papers are rife with Welfare Reform, with The Government bleating and waxing lyrical about how it pays to work and they want to encourage more people into living without benefits.  However, we need to ask ourselves, do they really?  I think not.  They want it so we're working yet still to some extent dependent on welfare for the easiest route to controlling people is financially, making them financially dependent on you gives you ultimate control over them.

To have financial independence from them would deplete their control over us so they're being tactical, having us believe they're offering us freedom yet what it really is is just conditional independence riddled with threats and implications.

If they truly wanted people to have financial independence and be able to sustain a quality of life through work alone there are two main things they could implement:

1. Introduce a living wage.  The minimum wage in the current economic climate with the ever increasing rise in cost of basic living simply fails to sustain a person or family.  However it does qualify them to claim working tax credits to top up a wage to enable a person/family to be able to sustain a quality of life.  Through ensuring the minimum wage alone isn't enough, they're taxing you for working on one hand yet giving you money with another to keep you dependent on them and under their control and subject to their ever increasing rigid conditionalities.  Sneaky bastards.

2. Scrap the abhorrent slight to Human Rights that is WorkFare.  If there is a job available, employ somebody to do it and give them the appropriate wage which they can then be taxed on and spent thus helping to renew the economy and move off of benefits.  Yet the government would rather give companies cash incentives to take on workfare staff to do a job for free thus exploiting the unemployed whilst offering them no real benefit let alone an actual job at the end of it. If you're going to mandate people into temporary work, temporarily pay them the actual wage!

Obviously there are many more things that could be added to his list, perhaps I'll bore you with them some other time.  I try and keep clear of politics on here but sometimes....things just need to be said.